Amy S. Greenberg is Associate Professor of History at the Pennsylvania State University, where she has also directed the Program in American Studies. She is author of Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1998) as well as articles on nineteenth-century masculinity, urban development, and violence. She is currently at work on a study of expansionism in American culture.

The 1848 Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo marked the end of America’s large territorial acquisitions, but did not end America’s greed for land. Between the Mexican War and the Civil War, American culture was suffused with expansionist fervor, as travel writers, journalists, politicians, and armed mercenaries evaluated Latin America in terms of its suitability for annexation. This talk will explore America’s expansionist culture in the antebellum period and will reveal the manner in which particularly gendered concerns structured the discourse of Manifest Destiny.